The Angel Esmeralda - Don Delillo [53]
We watched TV in one of the common rooms. There was a large flat screen, wall-mounted, certain channels blocked, programs selected by one of the veteran inmates, a different man each month. On this day only five places were occupied in the eighty or so folding chairs in the arched rows. I was here to see a particular program, an afternoon news broadcast, fifteen minutes, on a children’s channel. One segment was a stock market report. Two girls, earnestly amateurish, reported on the day’s market activity.
I was the only one watching the show. The other inmates sat half dazed, heads down. It was a matter of time of day, time of year, dusk nearly upon us, the depressive specter of last light stirring at the oblong windows high on one wall. The men sat distanced from each other, here to be alone. This was the call to self-examination, the second-guessing of a lost life, no less compelling than the believer’s call to prayer.
I watched and listened. The girls were my daughters, Laurie and Kate, ten and twelve. Their mother had told me, curtly, over the phone, that the kids had been selected to appear on such a program. No details available, she said, at the present time, as if she were reporting, herself, from a desk in a studio humming with off-camera tensions.
I sat in the second row, alone, and there they were, sharing a table, speaking about fourth-quarter estimates, first one girl, then the other, a couple of sentences at a time, credit quality, credit demand, the tech sector, the budget deficit. The picture had the quality of online video, user-generated. I tried to detach myself, to see the girls as distant references to my daughters, in jittery black and white. I studied them. I observed. They read their lines from pages held in their hands, each looking up from the page as she yielded to the other reader.
Did it seem crazy, a market report for kids? There was nothing sweet or charming about the commentary. The girls were not playing at being adult. They were dutiful, blending occasional definitions and explanations into the news, and then Laurie’s eyes showed fleeting panic in her remarks about the Nasdaq Composite—a mangled word, a missing sentence. I took the report to be a tentative segment of a barely noticed show on an obscure cable channel. It wasn’t any crazier, probably, than most TV, and anyway who was watching?
My bunkmate wore socks to bed. He tucked his pajama legs into the socks and lay on his bunk, knees up and hands folded behind his head.
“I miss my walls,” he said.
He had the lower bunk. This was a matter of some significance in the camp, top or bottom, who gets what, like every prison movie we’d ever seen. Norman was senior to me in age, experience, ego and time served and I had no reason to complain.
I thought of telling him that we all miss our walls, we miss our floors and ceilings. But I sat and waited for him to continue.
“I used to sit and look. One wall, then another. After a while I’d get up and walk around the apartment, slowly, looking, wall to wall. Sit and look, stand and look.”
He seemed to be under a spell, reciting a bedtime story he’d heard as a child.
“You collected art, is that it?”
“That’s it, past tense, collected. Major museum quality.”
“You’ve never mentioned this,” I said.
“I’ve been here how long? They’re somebody else’s walls now. The art is scattered.”
“You had advisers, experts on the art market.”
“People used to come and look at my walls. Europe, Los Angeles, a Japanese man from some foundation in Japan.”
He sat quietly for a time, remembering. I found myself remembering with him. The Japanese man took on facial features, a certain size and shape, portly, it seemed, pale suit, dark tie.
“Collectors, curators, students. They came and looked,” he said.
“Who advised you?”
“I had a woman on Fifty-seventh Street. There was a guy in London, Colin, knew everything